About the AuthorKris Holt

In 2016, Samsung’s smartphone division wasn’t so much on the rocks as dangling by a single fingernail, millimeters from plunging into a deep, dark chasm. The Galaxy Note7 had a terrible habit of exploding or catching fire. Not exactly the best look considering people prefer not to be injured while checking Instagram. The Galaxy Note8 is free of those combustible foibles, we’ve been assured.

If you’ve looked at Facebook for more than a minute over the last few years, there’s no question that you’ll have encountered a top-down, perfectly filmed food video from BuzzFeed’s Tasty channel. The cooking clips are enormously popular on the social network, racking up billions of views a month. Now BuzzFeed is trying to monetize its success in a new way. Enter the Tasty One Top, a hot plate that seeks to make cooking simpler.

The Echo Show is the first in Amazon’s line of smart speakers to incorporate a screen, and it seems very much more “speaker with a display” than “tablet with better audio and microphones.” It has all the functionality of Echo, including access to Alexa, Amazon’s voice-operated assistant. The screen can, for example, provide a more detailed weather outlook than what Alexa spouts out.

The battle for your home just got a little more intense as Apple pulled back the curtain on HomePod, its smart speaker that seeks to hold dominion over your home empire and all the gadgets that reside within. HomePod holds a 4-inch woofer and seven tweeters, and it has six microphones to pick up your voice commands for Siri, wherever you happen to be in the room.

Amazon’s Echo system, which brought the company’s Alexa assistant to tables and countertops as a hub for your home, now has evolved into something a little more visually minded. I don’t mean the brand new Echo Show — it’s the Echo Look that has caught my eye. The Echo Look has a built-in camera that captures both audio and video. Amazon wants you to use it to help you choose your outfits.

Samsung is back with a new pair of flagship smartphones it desperately needs to be hits in the wake of previous handsets that were a touch too, erm, explodey. The Galaxy S8 and S8+ have dispensed with the physical home button and added an artificial intelligence assistant, screens that so very almost kill the bezel, and fingerprint sensors on the rear. It’s a smart, striking design.

The Internet is a minefield on April 1, with tech companies getting in on the April Fools’ act in weird, wonderful and often woeful ways. The line between a successful prank and one that leaves users sighing, or worse, is micron-thin, and the boost to one’s reputation — or knock on it — can hang around for some time. This year, we’ve rounded up some of the Internet’s worst April Fools’ pranks.

Transcribing speech is tedious, but until voice recognition truly can handle all manner of accents and verbal tics, it’s a necessary evil. Hands up, everyone who thinks I wouldn’t want a machine to take care of that for me. No one? Good. Titan Note records and transcribes audio, with a particular trick up its sleeve: It can discern different speakers when it’s transcribing.

Regular readers will know that I’ve played games my entire life. I hold deep reverence for the care and attention that go into creating these experiences, and I’ve rarely met a game I didn’t want to conquer. Yet I am nervous about virtual reality. I’ve tried it and found those disorientating worlds difficult to handle, though I suspect that over time I could grow more accustomed to it.

Trust Razer to come up with something completely ridiculous that I need in my life immediately. Project Ariana is a projector that incorporates Razer’s full-spectrum lighting system, Chroma. It uses a wide-angle lens to project images. Its 3D depth-sensing cameras detect objects in a room and adjust for them accordingly so that it still projects a flat image.

LG features twice in this edition of the column with two very different but similarly strange speakers. The “Levitating Portable Speaker” has as descriptive and accurate a name as the “Small Transparent Speaker” from last month’s edition of this column. You can call it “PJ9” if you prefer the duller moniker. Yes, through the magic of electromagnets and a base station, this speaker will levitate and pump out audio in every direction.

Bose’s latest earbuds are designed to help you tune in to the specific sounds you want to hear. Hearphones are a sort of blend of noise-cancelling earbuds and hearing aids. There are several presets in the app, with names like “focused conversation,” “gym,” “airplane” and “television.” You can opt to crank up the volume on all sound from the world around you or turn it down.

RokBlok is a portable record player without a turntable. It’s a block that dashes around the top of your records, and uses both its needle and built-in speaker to soundtrack your day. All you need to operate it are your records and a flat surface. If you’d like higher quality audio, you can connect it to your Bluetooth speaker or headphones. It’s designed with protecting your records in mind.

In a previous column, I revealed how terrible a sleeper I am. My mattress is old, and there’s a sizable dent on my side of the bed. It’s probably time to find a new mattress, so perhaps it’s time to consider one that connects with the rest of my home. Eight’s smart mattress gives you a little more incentive to get out of bed, as you can set up a string of IFTTT recipes to improve your morning routine.

I’m at long last about to start setting up my new home office. Goodbye, Ikea dining table. Hello, fancy new desk. When I actually have my new setup, I’d like to have a monitor at long last to complement my laptop. AOC’s latest is under serious consideration. The AG352QCX is a 35-inch, curved behemoth with two USB 3.0 ports, one HDMI 2.0 input, VGA, DVI, audio in and out ports, and DisplayPort 1.2.

Apple has unveiled a redesigned MacBook Pro, giving the company’s core laptop its first full refresh in a few years. The design has metal on all sides, along with a Force Touch trackpad double the size of previous versions. There’s a customizable OLED touch strip above the keyboard that responds to gestures and taps, useful for fast access to emoji or secondary controls within an app.

I’ve tried dipping my toes into the world of podcasting with a friend this year. We haven’t found it easy to get together to record, but for the two trial runs we’ve had, I bought a Blue Snowball mic. I’m very pleased with the sound quality, so I’m fairly certain I’d be happy to have Blue’s latest microphone, Raspberry. It’s a gorgeous, portable little thing.

The first smartphones Google has made by itself, Pixel and Pixel XL, are the first to bear Android 7.1 and the first to have the impressive Google Assistant built in. The Pixel has a 5-inch HD screen, while the Pixel XL offers a 5.5-inch QHD display. The phones have a quad-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. I like that the fingerprint sensor is on the back.